win 98 to xp didn't work.......

[chinadoll]

win 98 to xp on a amdk6 3d 128mbram 12gb hdd will it work???
follow up to my recent post as above....tried it once as a straight upgrade and the machine rebooted after 10 minutes into upgrade and said it couldn't find a file called something like NTDL .....luckily had rescue disc and returned to win 98 .....tried again and waited 2 and half hours for it to install (screen said time remaining 68minutes for 2and half hours) gave up and pressed the escape button and retuned to win98....can anyone spot what went wrong.......thanks.

[Potatoman]

Hmmm..... I am rubbing my chin in wonderment!!!! Put it this way... I have a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz and 1Gb ram and its takes about 30 mins to do a clean install on a blank hard disk. I would say that the your install time would be about right. I think the NTDL file was maybe a blip as you say the second attempt was ok. Try again, but persevere with it. It is worth it. Please dont think im being rude, but your PC is only just above the minimum required. Maybe its time to upgrade your system...? Because XP needs more system resources, you may find after installation and upgrade is essential. Let us know.

[j2buttonsw]

I have only seen this when you have a hardware fault (especially a bad hard drive or memory - RAM). It is difficult to diagnose properly without swapping out the memory or hard drive and trying it again. I suspect you don't have diagnostic software so unless you want to do a bit more investigation I would leave it as 98.

[OBonio]

It was probably the NTLDR file which is used at boot up for all NT based systems (NT 3.51, 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP).  I wouldn't go the upgrade route as these have historically been not too good.  Archive off all your important stuff and do a clean install, making sure you format as NTFS and NOT FAT32 (which win98 uses).  Have a look here if you get the NTLDR problem again : http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz/troubleshoot.html

[Potatoman]

I 110% agree with OBonio. Wipe the disk and do a clean install. The only problem-free way of doing it, methinks.

[dodgyshirt]

Does your PC have onboard graphics or a separate card because 128mb of ram is an absolute minimum to run XP and if some of your 128mb is allocated to the graphics the PC will really struggle.Also if you are doing it as an upgrade with such a small HDD (by XP standards) there may not be enough room in which to install XP if it is already highly populated.